I am taking this week off from blogging in order to visit with family, but before I do I want to make another plea for support! January through March were good months (thank you!), but in April donations have slowed to almost a halt and so have Amazon purchases (and don’t forget Pangea!, see below).

One reader had a great idea of setting up a recurring gift option and I have done just that. Please see the Subscribe button on the website where you can choose a level of monthly support (and cancel at any time). And you can make a one-time donation through the link below or the Buy Now button on the website.

I am wondering how people felt about the Of Meat and Mortality series. Was it interesting at all? Was it too much info? In the past, I would have read all four papers, analyzed them, and then just reported my final summary at the end of Part 4. But then there would have been a long lag in my blogging in which people might have thought I fell off the earth. And it might actually be interesting for readers to see the process of analyzing these topics. Hopefully it will give you confidence in talking to your friends and colleagues, who no doubt send you a link to every story that finds meat good for you.

I have dozens of single studies to go through when I get back from break and will hopefully be able to crank out short, interesting topics relevant to veganism without getting sidetracked for long on any particular subject.

Feedburner reports that subscriptions are up to over 1,600 readers! That’s great news – thank you for sharing my posts.

And thank you for any other support you can give – it does make a big difference!

Support JackNorrisRd.com

Please share and/or like my posts! Thanks!

I greatly appreciate donations of any amount at PayPal (click here).

JackNorrisRD.com gets a % when you buy anything through the Pangea and Amazon links below.

Consider a gift basket from Pangea through the link below for Mother’s Day or some other holiday!

Amazon.com Gift Cards – E-mail Delivery

Vegan for Life: Everything You Need to Know to Be Healthy and Fit on a Plant-Based Diet from Amazon.com

It has been a month since I made a special post asking for support. And I wouldn’t do so, except that I’ve seen a drop off in last couple weeks in Amazon purchases and donations. The good news is that I’ve been very excited by how much people do respond to my pleas, so thank you!

Here are some of the highlights from the last month:

By far the most popular was the most recent:
“I was Vegan for A While, But…”

A colleague of mine had some feedback on the cholesterol/steroid hormone part of that post and I updated it with some research.

Vitamin D2 vs. D3

Calcium Supplements and Cardiovascular Disease in the News

Strontium for Increasing Bone Mineral Density

NPR and Animals

It was quite a month for bones and ex-vegans. Hopefully, the work I’m doing will prevent many of the possible future ex-vegan cases from ever happening.

As always, below is how you can help support these efforts. Thank you!

Support JackNorrisRd.com

Please share and/or like my posts! Thanks!

I greatly appreciate direct donations – you can enter any amount:

If button doesn’t work, please click through to website. Thank you!

If you buy anything from Pangea through this link, you not only support me, but also the good people at Pangea who painstakingly research their products to minimize any impact on animals, the earth, and workers.

Amazon.com Gift Cards – E-mail Delivery

Vegan for Life: Everything You Need to Know to Be Healthy and Fit on a Plant-Based Diet from Amazon.com

A great resource for vegans into fitness:

VeganFitness.net

It’s been 3 weeks since my last plea to support JackNorrisRD.com. I got a great response from that plea, too, which was very exciting.

In the meantime, I have made a bunch of posts that I hope will help my readers be more informed on issues – it is amazing how many issues get raised in vegan nutrition.

In those three weeks, I’ve picked up about 50 new subscribers bringing the total to 1,500 (via Feedburner anyway). That is good news, but our movement needs many more people knowledgeable about vegan nutrition. I’ve been seeing some things lately showing that the scientific research is not getting through to all animal advocates!

Every post I make has a Facebook “Like” button at the top (you have to click through to the website). If you have a second to like the post, that would go a long way to getting more attention for the blog.

And see below for other ways you can support the site.

Okay, that’s my spiel for this week. Thank you for continuing to read the posts!

Support JackNorrisRd.com

I greatly appreciate direct donations – you can enter any amount:

If button doesn’t work, please click through to website. Thank you!

If you buy anything from Pangea through this link, you not only support me, but also the good people at Pangea who painstakingly research their products to minimize any impact on animals, the earth, and workers.

Amazon.com Gift Cards – E-mail Delivery

Vegan for Life: Everything You Need to Know to Be Healthy and Fit on a Plant-Based Diet from Amazon.com

Thank you for reading JackNorrisRD.com! As you might have noticed, I have been upping my nutrition output lately. I’m hoping that most readers have found it interesting.

I’ve been trying to focus on answering the questions that so many vegans have. Almost any vegan is by default an advocate because you are going to get so many questions. My aim is to answer them as accurately as possible and without spin. I never set off to research a topic with the intention of finding studies to support my position, but rather to find out what evidence there is for various points of view. My opinion on many of the questions I answer changes as I research the subject for a post. And after posting, my readers often point out angles that I hadn’t considered — thank you!

There are not many places you can go for this sort of frankness. And the more you support this site, the more I can address additional topics. I currently have a nutrition inbox of almost 200 messages – many are questions or new information from readers that I am hoping to get to in the near future.

Here is what you can do:

1. Share it! Tweet it! Pass the posts onto friends who might be interested in vegan nutrition!

I currently have just under 1,500 subscribers, making this the least-subscribed-to blog in the vegan movement! (Actually, I’m not sure about that, but I wouldn’t be surprised.) I would love to see that rise to 2,000 by the end of February – it would make a huge difference.

2. I greatly appreciate direct donations – you can enter any amount:

If button doesn’t work, please click through to website. Thank you!

3. Buying stuff through the links below is this site’s largest source of support.

If you buy anything from Pangea through this link, you not only support me, but also the good people at Pangea who painstakingly research their products to minimize any impact on animals, the earth, and workers.

You can buy gift cards, compact discs, digital music downloads and most anything else through any of the links to Amazon.com below.

I am not someone who tends to be very product-oriented, but there is one I recently discovered that is simply amazing: Hurraw lip balm. Not only does it make your lips feel fantastic, but it lasts forever. I bought a stick last August and am still using it. I have the green tea flavor which I love, but even better is their coffee flavored stick that, in a rare act of shameless altruism, I gave to my beloved wife.

Hurraw! Lip Balm

Vegan for Life: Everything You Need to Know to Be Healthy and Fit on a Plant-Based Diet from Amazon.com

 

Amazon.com Gift Cards – E-mail Delivery

Thank you very much for supporting this site – it makes a big difference!

Do you want more of this?

950,000 students at 970 schools were handed a Vegan Outreach booklet on factory farming and slaughterhouses this past Fall.

If you like that, then you can double your donation to Vegan Outreach by donating now, before the end of the year!

Click here to donate.

Thank you,

Jack

P.S. A donation to Vegan Outreach will help to continue the decline in the demand for eating animals that has recently been seen in the U.S.

Dr. Michael Greger’s Latest in Clinical Nutrition Volume 11 is now available.

I found Volume 11 to be especially interesting. Some of the highlights:

• The spice saffron can improve PMS symptoms and even reduced depression on par with Prozac.
• Some cases of fibromyalgia appear to be caused by the artificial sweetener aspartame.
• Mushrooms are the best source of the amino acid ergothioneine which may be an important antioxidant for the mitochondria. Mushrooms can also reduce the risk of breast cancer.
• Dr. Greger has previously talked about bacteria endotoxins from meat causing a state of inflammation in the body. This time, he spends a few videos on a unique molecule found in meat, Neu5Gc, as a cause of inflammation.
• Potassium can reduce the risk of stroke and rheumatoid arthritis symptoms and 98% of Americans are not meeting the DRI of 4,700 mg per day. The best sources are tomato sauce, orange juice, greens, beans, and dates.
• Fructose can increase uric acid which can in turn increase gout, diabetes, heart disease, and stroke.

Dear Readers,

It has been a very long time since I reminded everyone how you can support this blog.

If you click on any of the links in the sidebar to buy something at Amazon or Pangea, JackNorrisRD.com gets a percentage! This is a meaningful amount of money, too! And I really appreciate that so many people follow through and buy through these links. Thank you!

Vegan Outreach has started our end of year matching fundraiser where anything you donate will be doubled by another supporter. Our leafleters have been on a tear! They have been to 700 schools and handed out booklets to just short of 700,000 students this Fall, and have persuaded multitudes of students to change to a more compassionate diet. They do this in all sorts of weather and remote parts of the U.S. and Canada that are never reached otherwise. Please help support this terribly important work in our efforts to make veganism mainstream!

Click here to donate.

Thank you again!

I received the following question:

“My husband is going to require a feeding tube for the next couple months and I cannot find any commercial products that are vegan. Any idea if I could meet his nutritional needs using say a VitaMix and pureeing his vegan food? Any ideas would be most helpful.”

In further correspondence, I found out his tube is abdominal which is good because they are larger than the nasal tubes.

A fellow RD sent me this link which was very helpful (thanks, Debbie!):

http://csn.cancer.org/node/205380

And I told the person who wrote me that I would make a blog post to see if anyone else has experience with vegan tube feeding and to create a page that people can refer to in the future. So, please comment if you have some good info.

Thanks!

I haven’t posted much in awhile for a few reasons: no studies on vegetarians have been released in some time, I have been spending most of my nights and weekends upgrading Vegan Outreach’s Adopt a College website, and my wife and I have been planning a move from Oakland to Davis, CA. A very busy summer.

During this time, Dr. Michael Greger, the hardest working man in vegan nutrition, has released 3 DVDs. I finally watched them this past week. The first is a 1-hour talk he recently gave, Uprooting the Leading Causes of Death, in which he presents evidence that a plant-based diet can reduce the risk of most of the top 15 causes of death in the USA. The other two DVDs, Volume 9 and 10 of his Latest in Clinical Nutrition series covered some interesting topics. Here were the highlights for me:

- Meat causes a general state of inflammation in the body, which is linked to heart disease, and this is primarily due to the endotoxin load from the bacteria in these foods.
- Green tea and kiwi = awesome.
- Magnesium is important for preventing sudden cardiac death and the best sources are whole grains and leafy greens.
- Plant foods boost serotonin levels better than does meat.
- Plant proteins are incomplete, but this is good because their incompleteness prevents the production of the protein IGF-1 which is lower in vegans. But plant protein is not so incomplete that it prevents the production of IGF-1 Binding Protein, which is higher in vegans. The combination of low IGF-1 and high IGF-1 Binding Protein should significantly decreases the risk of cancer.

And, as always, the DVDs were loaded with all the ways in which meat gets contaminated and causes foodborne illnesses.

Whenever I get done watching one of Dr. Greger’s DVD’s I find it amazing that people who eat meat can live more than a few weeks. Dr. Greger points out that while the lifespan has increased in the USA, the sickspan (length of time at the end of people’s lives that is spent sick) has increased even more.

As always, for anyone interested in nutrition, I highly recommend these DVDs or subscribing to the daily videos at Dr. Greger’s website NutritionFacts.org.

Now I need to get this posted, as I imagine the next one is on its way!